Haslun

By training, I'm a corporate attorney — credit facilities, secured transactions, the architecture of complex deals. I spent years at firms like Skadden and Kirkland building documents that had to be precise and internally consistent.

Watercolor is a different discipline but a similar puzzle: you're still constructing complex layers that have to hold together logically, but the medium pushes back and you can't always control it the way you can control a defined term.

Why watercolor? Because I'm too distractible for oil painting. Drawing and doodling was how I channeled mental energy as a kid. But in college, I was an impatient and admittedly below average oil painter which discouraged me from pursuing it further. I didn't rediscover that compulsive need for art in my life until my thirties, when I was diagnosed with AuDHD and desperately needed something to do that didn't involve a screen.

Watercolor stuck because I can start and finish a piece in one sitting. My natural hyperfocus kicks in, everything aligns into a "flow" state, and three hours later there's a painting. That never happened to me with oil, try as I might. So rather than fight my own nature to fit the medium, I found a medium that fits a chaotic brain that loves to observe the world but can only work in short bursts of creative energy.

Law trained me to care about precision. Watercolor keeps teaching me that precision isn't control. You work with what happens on the page, fix what you can, and leave the rest as evidence that a human was here.

(Also, the history of pigments, and the science of how our eyes perceive layered wavelengths of color, fascinates the scientist in me—hence the Color Lab.)